► This dissertation tracks a peculiar “re-institutionalization” between 1945 and 1990, showing how involuntary confinement in psychiatric hospitals and prisons transformed in both significance and scope.…
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▼ This dissertation tracks a peculiar “re-institutionalization” between 1945 and 1990, showing how involuntary confinement in psychiatric hospitals and prisons transformed in both significance and scope. The project focuses on these changes in Pennsylvania and argues that during the post-war era, the public sector relied primarily on custodial psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons to handle social problems. In subsequent decades, the state government increasingly sought rehabilitative alternatives to custodial institutions such as community mental health centers and work-release prison programs. This anti-institutionalism came to a halt in the 1970s as conservative politicians rejected alternatives to prisons and transferred supervision of people in the mental health system to the criminal system. Highlighting this previously unstudied process, the dissertation argues that policymakers replaced involuntary confinement in mental health institutions with imprisonment. In this way, it recasts the rise of mass incarceration as part of a larger history of confinement in the U.S. rather than the sudden product of the late twentieth century.
This re-institutionalization challenges the narrative of the rise of conservatism as primarily a rejection of state welfare responsibilities. Instead, new conservative policies shifted priorities away from welfare and medical authority and towards security and punishment, dramatically altering the state’s relationships to its citizens in ways determined by notions of race, gender and class. Drawing on disability history and public history, the dissertation employs research focused on local people, places and communities and collections on mental health and corrections in Pennsylvania previously unused by historians. The research has uncovered how many former mental hospitals converted into prisons in the 1980s, a national phenomenon the project identifies through local examples. The dissertation challenges the narrative of deinstitutionalization as a largely federal development and instead focuses on the changes at the state and local levels, where the politics of mental health and imprisonment most often intersected.
Advisors/Committee Members: Fink, Leon (advisor).

► The clearest and most powerful lens through which to view society is the Marxian lens of class conflict. In the dissertation I apply this lens…
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▼ The clearest and most powerful lens through which to view society is the Marxian lens of class conflict. In the dissertation I apply this lens to the study of the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression, specifically of their experiences and struggles to survive in a hostile political economy. Scattered through historical scholarship are many partial accounts of the social history of the Depression’s victims, but none that focuses, comprehensively, on the city of Chicago. Nor does any propose quite the interpretation adopted here, which sheds earlier assumptions of the “passivity” and “apathy” of the long-term unemployed in favor of emphasizing the implicit and explicit anti-capitalist radicalism and working-class consciousness of the unemployed poor. They were not merely bewildered lost souls blown hither and thither by the economic gale; on a large scale, they tended toward resolute resistance against miserly relief financing, cruel bureaucratic procedures, police protection of private property, capitalist prioritization of high profits above social welfare, and the very fact of mass economic insecurity itself. On a relatively unpolitical level, working-class neighborhoods persevered through an essentially communistic sharing of resources and mutual self-defense against the depredations of the dominant social order. But on a more political level, millions followed the Communist Party and other far-left organizations in an attempt to compel Congress to pass the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Act in 1935, one of the most popular bills of the decade not in spite of but because of its socialistic nature. Running through the dissertation is a dual polemic against idealist social philosophies and the Gramscian interpretation of capitalist society as relatively coherent and culturally/ideologically integrated. Instead, I emphasize the role of class struggle and the violence that emanates from it as the main guarantors of social order. In the end, my hope is that this study may illuminate current and future social conflicts and possibilities, as I argue that the American political economy is now in a state analogous to that which precipitated the Great Depression.
Advisors/Committee Members: Fink, Leon (advisor).

Wright, C. (2017). Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. (Thesis). University of Illinois – Chicago. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10027/21826

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Wright, Christopher. “Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression.” 2017. Thesis, University of Illinois – Chicago. Accessed March 21, 2019.
http://hdl.handle.net/10027/21826.

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Wright, Christopher. “Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression.” 2017. Web. 21 Mar 2019.

Vancouver:

Wright C. Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. [Internet] [Thesis]. University of Illinois – Chicago; 2017. [cited 2019 Mar 21].
Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10027/21826.

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Council of Science Editors:

Wright C. Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. [Thesis]. University of Illinois – Chicago; 2017. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10027/21826

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

3.
Rosen, John J.Guardians of the Black Working Class: Labor and Racial Politics in Postwar San Francisco.

► “Guardians of the Black Working Class” tells two intersecting stories of postwar urban America. First and foremost, it examines the impact of the “Second Great…
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▼ “Guardians of the Black Working Class” tells two intersecting stories of postwar urban America. First and foremost, it examines the impact of the “Second Great Migration” on San Francisco and in particular the way in which black labor migrants experienced and transformed the city in the decades following World War II. Second, it provides a different perspective from which to view the “urban crisis” and the fate of postwar liberalism. Contrary to the dominant declension narrative that dominates the historical writing about postwar cities and liberalism, San Francisco seemed to survive the urban crisis comparatively well and represents a place where liberalism remained preeminent in the local political culture. Drawing upon an array of union archives, manuscript collections, government records, African-American newspapers, and oral histories, this dissertation argues that black trade unionists, with the support of their unions and especially the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), had a lot to do with this. Arriving in a city with a weak black political and civil rights tradition, a cadre of African-American workers who settled in San Francisco during and shortly after World War II emerged as influential community and civic leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. This study suggests that black trade unionists, who considered themselves the guardians of the city’s black working class in the postwar period, occupied a unique social, economic, and political niche from which they sought to lead the fight for racial justice and strengthen liberalism in the postwar era. Placing them at the center of the story of civil rights, urban crisis, and liberalism sheds new light on the history of race, class, and politics in postwar urban America.
Although San Francisco’s past does not always conform to the dominant Midwest-Northeast-centered postwar narrative of African American, political, and urban history, it should not be dismissed an exception or an anomaly. Rather, its distinct and regional characteristics should be considered as variations, alternatives, and contingencies that existed alongside the more well-known histories of its thoroughly-studied counterparts. This dissertation contends that San Francisco can draw our attention to historical developments that might not be as apparent in other places.
Advisors/Committee Members: Fink, Leon (advisor).

Rosen, J. J. (2014). Guardians of the Black Working Class: Labor and Racial Politics in Postwar San Francisco. (Thesis). University of Illinois – Chicago. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10027/18764

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Rosen, John J. “Guardians of the Black Working Class: Labor and Racial Politics in Postwar San Francisco.” 2014. Thesis, University of Illinois – Chicago. Accessed March 21, 2019.
http://hdl.handle.net/10027/18764.

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Rosen, John J. “Guardians of the Black Working Class: Labor and Racial Politics in Postwar San Francisco.” 2014. Web. 21 Mar 2019.

► This dissertation is a study of American capitalist development from the early 19th century through the early 20th century as understood through the actions of…
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▼ This dissertation is a study of American capitalist development from the early 19th century through the early 20th century as understood through the actions of business organizations (local and national boards of trade and chambers of commerce) in attempting to influence and change public policy and cultural perceptions of business and its role in American society. The primary actors in this narrative are the merchant capitalists who, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, began creating local commercial organizations in order to control local trade and expand the economic possibilities of their particular urban center and region. These organizations laid the groundwork for cooperation and competition between groups of merchants as they sought to shape the regional and national dynamics of economic growth. Composed of the leading merchants, small manufacturers, and financiers of the major commercial centers of the country, these groups quickly became the most important representatives of the “business community” in their respective cities. The sectional crisis gave the nationalist impetus for merchants to form the National Board of Trade (NBOT), a national associations of these local groups created in 1868, and the organization that is the foundation of this study. Over the course of the late 19th century the merchants of the NBOT debated, lobbied, and ultimately shaped the conversation over a number of the primary problems of political economy in the U.S., including regulation of transportation and communication, trade policy, and monetary reform. This work parses out the ways in which these organized merchants tried to shape economic change in terms of a republican political economy based on the ideal of an economic commonwealth that was in many ways crumbling, often due to economic changes brought about by merchants themselves. The actions of the NBOT exemplified how organized business interests attempted to maintain their control over economic life, based on antebellum economic ideals, in the context of the creation of a modern industrial nation. This study reframes the expansion of the political and economic institutions of 19th century capitalism through a more focused understanding of how organized businessmen structured questions of political economy and legitimized their role as social and political stewards of a national economy.
Advisors/Committee Members: Fink, Leon (advisor).

Davis, C. A. (2015). A Merchant's Republic: The National Board of Trade and Commercial Capitalism in the U.S., 1840-1912. (Thesis). University of Illinois – Chicago. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10027/19533

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Davis, Cory A. “A Merchant's Republic: The National Board of Trade and Commercial Capitalism in the U.S., 1840-1912.” 2015. Thesis, University of Illinois – Chicago. Accessed March 21, 2019.
http://hdl.handle.net/10027/19533.

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Davis CA. A Merchant's Republic: The National Board of Trade and Commercial Capitalism in the U.S., 1840-1912. [Internet] [Thesis]. University of Illinois – Chicago; 2015. [cited 2019 Mar 21].
Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10027/19533.

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation

Council of Science Editors:

Davis CA. A Merchant's Republic: The National Board of Trade and Commercial Capitalism in the U.S., 1840-1912. [Thesis]. University of Illinois – Chicago; 2015. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10027/19533

Note: this citation may be lacking information needed for this citation format:Not specified: Masters Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation